{"id":13250,"date":"2015-10-11T07:41:24","date_gmt":"2015-10-11T12:41:24","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=13250"},"modified":"2015-10-11T07:41:24","modified_gmt":"2015-10-11T12:41:24","slug":"the-end-of-academic-freedom-in-america-the-case-of-steven-salaita","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=13250","title":{"rendered":"The End of Academic Freedom in America: the Case of Steven Salaita"},"content":{"rendered":"

The End of Academic Freedom in America: the Case of Steven Salaita<\/a><\/h3>\n

In the twenty-one years I spent at Columbia University, there was always some professor or another coming under attack from the Israel lobby\u2014starting with the famous brouhaha of Edward Said throwing a rock or two at an Israeli military watchtower near the border with Lebanon. AIPAC would have had you believe that this was not a symbolic act but an existential threat to a state armed with nuclear weapons. But no matter the intensity of the witch-hunt, I was always proud to see my employer stand up for the free speech rights of the faculty.<\/p>\n

As such my attention has been riveted on the trials and tribulations of Steven Salaita who was unfortunate enough to be the victim of a combined assault by the Israel lobby and a university officialdom that was determined to make him pay for telling the truth, no matter how bitter that truth. Since I am very close to some tenure-track professors, I have a better handle than most on what it means to be robbed of a tenured position. Getting tenure nowadays is almost like winning the American Idol contest, so the very idea of being denied a position and thrown to the wolves (no offense meant to a member of the animal kingdom far more noble than the University of Illinois mucketymucks) struck me as a wantonly destructive act\u2014all the more so since it was defended in Pecksniffian terms by the likes of Cary Nelson.<\/p>\n

When I posted an excerpt from Salaita\u2019s newly published \u201cUncivil Rites: Palestine and the Limits of Academic Freedom<\/a>\u201d on my blog this week, I was struck by the sharp rise in page views. Clearly, just about everybody on the left has a feeling that in this case the IWW slogan rings as true as ever: \u201cAn injury to one is an injury to all.\u201d<\/p>\n

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The End of Academic Freedom in America: the Case of Steven Salaita In the twenty-one years I spent at Columbia University, there was always some professor or another coming under attack from the Israel lobby\u2014starting with the famous brouhaha of Edward Said throwing a rock or two at an Israeli military watchtower near the border […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[9770,5493,9772,9771,9773],"class_list":["post-13250","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-liberty","tag-academic-freedom","tag-counterpunch","tag-steven-salaita","tag-tenure","tag-university-of-illinois"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13250","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=13250"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13250\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":13251,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13250\/revisions\/13251"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=13250"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=13250"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=13250"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}